"The Glory Punch"

John D MacDonald wrote short stories featuring many different sports during his early days as a pulp writer. For some of them he had to use his fertile imagination alone to conjure up a sense of the game. He certainly never climbed a mountain, or drove race cars, or battled the bulls in the arena. I can find no reference to him ever playing football -- at least in high school or in college -- or baseball, or certainly hockey, although he must have played a bit of the first two sports. But he did enjoy golf, and tennis, bowling, fishing and, believe it or not, boxing.

It was during his first stint in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, around 1933. He was a self-described “grotesque,” standing 6’2” and weighing a mere 137 pounds. He entered an amateur boxing tournament sponsored by the college, where the prize was “a gold watch, redeemable for $10 or $15.” The match was over almost before it began. He recalled years later that his opponent was so muscular that “he looked as if he were wearing his armpits on top of his shoulders.” He made short work of the future author, “dismantling [me] as if taking down a rail fence.” That was it for MacDonald’s boxing career.

But he wrote stories about boxing, and the detail that he provides in these tales indicates that he vividly recalled all the nuances of the sport. From “The Gentle Killer,” to “Half-Past Eternity,” from “Big John Fights Again” to “Hell’s Belter,” his obvious mastery of what went on in the ring informed these pulp tales and made them come alive. Of course, MacDonald was more interested in the human drama and the world which surrounded boxing -- any sport he wrote about, really -- and he focused each story around a protagonist’s struggle: with doubt, with fading skills, with the corrupt, dark underside of the sport. Most of the time it worked wonderfully.

Not so with “The Glory Punch,” I’m sorry to say. It wallows way too long in the minute details of a fifteen round fight and frames the protagonist’s dilemma and struggle around a backstory and device so old that it had whiskers on it, even back in the immediate post-war era. It was published in the July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories, that notable issue that featured four JDM tales in it -- the most ever in a pulp, or any kind of magazine. It’s probably the weakest of the four, and pales terribly against the author’s “Blue Water Fury,” one of his best stories of any kind.

Our hero is Harvey Westa, a successful boxer known popularly as "The Doctor," for reasons that MacDonald never bothers to explain. But at age 33 he senses that his talents might be waning, a concern that troubles him because of recent travails with his personal life.

Things had gone a little sour. The club had died of snow-blindness and that had taken a cut of the roll and it had also taken two of the annuities cashed in to meet the obligations. Then the court had been too generous with Mag. An additional two hundred a month for her and the kids. Joe had booked an exhibition tour... He needed the cash from the tour. Needed it badly.

But before Harvey can embark on the tour -- which will feature opponents he knows he can handle -- he has to go fifteen rounds with Buddy Mace. And he's not so sure about Mace. He’s one of “the strong boys,” heavily muscled with shoulders that amaze even Harvey, with a punch like an anvil. He’ll need to utilize all of the skills he’s learned over his career in order to avoid too many of Mace’s hard punches. If he loses against this boxer, the tour will be cancelled and there will be no money from it.

The story opens the day before the big match as Harvey talks with his trainer of seven years, Joe Klees, over a lunch of cheese blintzes. Klees is concerned about the strength of Harvey’s opponent Mace, but Harvey keeps his own doubts to himself. He’s just returned from a visit with his kids, and it leads to the following exchange.

"The little guy was showing me the right hook he's been working on. He starts it way back in left field and I showed him how to shorten it up. He told me his mom won't let him practice. After the fight I can have them for two whole days."

"How's my girl?"

"Cute like a bug. She kept saying 'Where's Joey? Where's Joey?' I promised her the four of us would do the zoo day after tomorrow.”

"You turn 'em back to Mag?"

"In the hotel lobby. She shook hands with me and gave me the frozen puss. Nice to see you, Hahvee. I trust the children were well behaved."

"Jesus, Harv. A woman like that. It had to be a woman like that."

"Mag's okay. Lots of people don't get along."

"Who could get along with her?"

"Break it off, Joe." The soft rasp had turned cool.

They get up to leave the cafe, and who just happens to be in the same place, at a big table with a lot of his noisy friends? Buddy Mace, of course. Mace has to say something to amuse the crowd he is with.

"There goes the champ."

Harv turned and walked back to the [table]. The crowd there was silent, expectant. Harv smiled sadly down at the square, ruddy face of Buddy Mace. Mace tried to stare him down.

"Look, kid," Harv said in his gently rasping voice, "take good care of yourself between now and tomorrow night. Get lots of sleep. I don't want it to look too easy. You know what I mean."

Mace flushed and tried to struggle up, saying, "Why you broken-down --"

Harv turned and walked away.

The next day is fight day, and as Harv looks at Mace across the ring he notices how strong the younger man looked. "Strong and fast, with a punch in either hand..." The fight begins.

And it seems to never end, for both the fighters and the reader. In the first round Harv manages to get a few good blows in and dodges just as many. In the clinch, however, Mace manages to land two blows to Harv's kidneys. "It was like being stabbed with a hot silver knife." The second round is much the same, but this time Mace manages a blow high on the head over the left ear. "The power of it frightened [Harv].” In the third Harv was slow in the clinch and again Mace landed a powerful blow to the side. And by the end of three, even though Harv had technically won all the rounds, he was feeling it and worry started to creep in. "Back in the corner Harv knew that he was no longer breathing right. Mace's sledge-work on his sides had taken its toll."

Joe advises Harv to “ride out” the next two rounds, to play defense and avoid any hits in order for him to get his strength back. The strategy works well in the fourth, but in the fifth Mace lands another powerful blow to his side. The younger man seemed to be getting stronger and faster…

Enough… you get the picture, and you can probably guess how it ends, right down to the moment Harv, barely conscious, figures out how to end it. It’s like something out of the pulps of the earliest part of the last century and, unfortunately, you can see it coming a mile away. Still, the writing is typical MacDonald of the period, crisp and descriptive in its minimalist way. Worth reading once for the few moments of insightful characterization of a successful man on the downward slope of his career.

“The Glory Punch” is the only John D MacDonald story in this particular issue of Fifteen Sports Stories that appears under the author’s name. The other three were disguised under “house names,” bylines that especially productive pulp authors used when more than one of their stories appeared in the same issue of a magazine. I’ve always wondered how it was decided which story got which name. Did MacDonald have any input on the process? Probably not, as he certainly must have recognized the vast superiority of his story “Blue Water Fury” and would have preferred that it be graced with his name rather than one of the other entries. He liked it so much that he included it his first short story anthology, 1966’s End of the Tiger and Other Stories under a new title, "The Big Blue". It was the only pulp story included in the anthology but it certainly held its own among other gems like “Hangover,” “Looie Follows Me,” “The Bear Trap” and “The Trap of Solid Gold.”

"Salute to Courage"

I do not hunt. We do not kill snakes. Dorothy carries housebound bugs into the great outdoors for release but is pure hell on a clothes moth. We trap whitefoot mice in our Adirondack camp and hate doing it. We both enjoy sports fishing. And we are both aficionados of the bull ring. Were the horses unpadded, we wouldn’t be. I am not interested in arguing these inconsistencies with anyone.

-- John D MacDonald, The House Guests, 1965

John D MacDonald’s long love affair with the sacrificial ritual of bullfighting began with the family’s first stay in Mexico, starting in late 1948 and ending in the summer of 1949. And while this period of his life was likely the first chance he had to witness the spectacle first hand, he probably  held romantic notions toward it through his adulation of the works of Ernest Hemingway, whose Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises both reveal that particular author’s own respect for the sport. While living in Cuernavaca during those early years of his writing career MacDonald and wife Dorothy traveled to Mexico City several times to witness toreo in the newly built Plaza de Toros, then (and still) the largest bullring in the world. One of the books in JDM’s personal library was Rex Smith’s 1957 study Biography of the Bulls: An Anthology of Spanish Bullfighting, which ended up as part of the author’s estate sale. A bullfighter is a peripheral character in his 1952 novel The Damned and several of his other novels contain references to the special qualities of the matador, including The Empty Trap, A Tan and Sandy Silence, A Deadly Shade of Gold and Bright Orange for the Shroud.

MacDonald wrote at least two short stories about bullfighting. The first was titled “Tank-Town Matador” and it appeared in the July 1949 issue of Argosy. The second appeared in one of the sports pulps, the April 1951 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories. MacDonald called it “The Lonely Journey,” but the FSS editors changed the title to “Salute to Courage.”

Those not familiar with the standard fare of the sports pulps may think nothing of a story about bullfighting appearing in the pages of one of these periodicals, but it was in fact a great rarity. In John Dinan’s excellent 1998 book on sports pulps (Sports in the Pulp Magazines), he categorizes the kinds of sports written about in one of the seminal sports titles, Street and Smith’s Sport Story Magazine. He tabulated 478 stories about baseball over the magazine’s 20-year run, 363 with boxing as background, 259 about football and 117 about tennis. There are multiple instances of sports such as car racing, bowling, swimming, bicycle racing, lacrosse and even ski jumping serving as the subject matter for the contents of this pulp, but not one story about bullfighting. In a check of my own modest collection of sports pulps, bullfighting also comes up a blank. After all, it is questionable that most of the readership for these kinds of pulps would have had any interest in the unique, specialized artform of the corrida de toros. In fact, most latinos don’t consider it a sport, but more of an artform, an aesthetic and emotional experience that, when conducted by a superior matador, is a transformative experience. In 1932 Hemingway wrote, “Bullfighting is not a sport. It was never supposed to be. It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull. It is played in three definite acts.”

MacDonald certainly felt this way, and it explains how an author with strong interests in conservation and ecology could embrace the form.

“Salute to Courage” is a coming-of-age story, more interesting in its observations of  the details of a young man’s first bullfight than it is in narrative or characterization. Its plot is obvious and its conclusion foregone, but mood and a sense of anticipation and fear are well imagined and executed. And it comes close to relaying a sense of the torero and the capture it has on its audience.

Seventeen year old Augustin Galvez lives with his family in an adobe hut near a small village eleven miles outside the city of Oaxaca. He awakens one Sunday morning and finds the hut is empty, his sister Rosalinda down at a nearby stream, his parents and three other siblings at early Mass. He begins to run toward his sister but quickly slows his pace as he remembers that this is a special day, one requiring great dignity. As he walks he sees the rest of his family approaching up the dirt road, his younger brothers and sisters oddly shy toward him. "Yesterday Augustin had been a familiar one with whom they could romp and play. Today all had changed. Today Augustin Galvez would enter the bullring at Oaxaca."

Augustin’s father had once been a matador, fighting under the name Banderillero, and he fought alongside the immortal Ramon Gaona before being gored in the leg by a great black Miura bull. As the family reaches Augustin he father takes him aside.

"It has been many years, eh? Perhaps it is all a selfishness on my part. To have a son do what I could not do. I had a certain skill with the banderillas, no more. My son, you have fought well the calves at the tientas. You have grace. I do not know if you have courage. I have taught you how to know the bulls, how to watch for their faults and virtues. But knowledge is nothing without courage. Today we will learn."

Father and son take the bus to to the city and are met by the Señor  Pimental, whose son Peralta is also fighting today, a young prodigy who has developed a following after killing three bulls in previous matches. There is a third matador on the bill, Vizcainas, another young novillero (novice) who Señor Pimental refers to as "a clown." Augustin is told that everyone coming today are here to see his son, but there is a small contingent of fans from Augustin’s village as well.

Vizcainas is the first to fight and Pimental’s description of him is borne out. The novillero’s passes are fluid but he works too far from the bull to elicit any excitement from the crowd. When the final portion of the fight, the faena, begins, it is apparent just how bad Vizcainas is.

It was a miserable faena, combining an inept torero with an unstable animal. All he could do was chop the beast to the left and to right with the small cape, without grace, without great danger, without any poetry. He went in soon to kill and he tried to thrust the sword and run away at the same time. He killed miserably in the fifth attempt and left the ring with an enormous chorus of whistles and catcalls.

Then it is Peralta’s turn, and Augustin sees why he has become popular with the crowd so quickly.

He was a puro fanatico, with passes that were too fast, too jerky, too unpractical -- yet working close to the animal every second, gaining tremendous emotion through the almost visible flare of his dedicated personality. It was only in the kill that he had grace... The sword sank cleanly. The animal went three paces and dropped.

Now it is Augustin’s turn and he feels what little courage he may have had quickly escaping him.

[He] wished that at that moment he could drop dead. He wanted some grotesque force to reverse the plaza clock so that the hands would begin to turn backward. He could not see the animal clearly as it came out. It seemed supernaturally fast.

Augustin’s performance makes Vizcainas look like a pro, as he seems unable to control his feet, stepping away from the charging bull with every pass. His eyes filled with tears at his inability to control his fear, and the crowd is merciless.

[They] screamed at him, calling clown and coward. The feet danced blithely, endlessly, gayly, always taking him back from the horns as the animal charged. Seat cushions rained down on him. One struck him in the small of the back, almost thrusting him forward on to the horns, and the crowd chanted a sardonic, "Olé!"

His kill is equally inept, chasing the veering bull around the ring until the creature is too exhausted to move.

Augustin leaves the ring and goes to his father, whose face is “the color of wax” and whose effort to smile reassuringly painful.

"The next one will be better, Augustin, my son."

"Papa, can I not go home? Can I not let someone take my second bull?"

This does not please his father and it is up to Augustin to do better the second time around.

As one can read from the excerpts above, MacDonald employs an almost affected style for “Salute to Courage,” a third person limited narration that has the sound of a Spanish translation. A common device, MacDonald has a special talent for employing this narrative technique for all of his people, and it works especially well in the multi-character books such as The Damned and Please Write for Details, both of which have sections inside the heads of Spanish speaking individuals.

There are a couple of very nice passages in other JDM novels containing references to the special qualities of the matador. In The Empty Trap Lloyd Wescott, while recuperating in the isolated Mexican village where he has been nursed him back to health, ruminates on the special qualities of the Mexican people, made unique by the combinations of the blood of the European Spanish and the American Aztecs.

Two bloods, and a code of blood. The sand of Mexico had quickly soaked up the steaming blood of honor for many years. A land of pride and of quick violence without mercy. Also a land of sullenness and the glorification of death. A land where they ate candy skulls, where brass marched in the funerals of children, where fireworks exploded under church pews on Christmas morning, a land where a baker from Monterrey, a bullfighter of neither nerve, grace nor talent, can finally achieve his goal of performing in the Plaza Mexico and filling its fifty-five thousand seats by a public proclamation of his intention to permit his first bull to kill him.

And Travis McGee, contemplating the possible life of an aging kept man with super-rich widow Jillian Brent-Archer in A Tan and Sandy Silence, engages in an imaginary conversation with Papa Hemingway and realizes that his time on this planet could quickly come to an end.

If I don't grasp the opportunity, somebody will find some quick and dirty way to let the sea air through my skull.

I'm overdue. That's what Meyer says, and that's what my gut says in a slow cold coil of tingling viscera. Overdue, and scared, and not ready for the end of it yet. The old bullfighters who have known the famous rings and famous breeds despise the little country corridas, because they know that if they do not quit, that is where they will die -- and the bull that hooks their steaming guts out onto the sand will be a poor animal without class or distinction or style.

“Salute to Courage” has, to the best of my knowledge, been reprinted only once, in the October 1952 issue of the Australian men’s magazine Cavalcade. That is the version I own and must assume that it is identical to the original in Fifteen Sports Stories.

Illustration from the Cavalcade reprint

"Bye, Bye, Backfield!"

If there is a pecking order among the different kinds of pulp magazines that flourished and then died in the last century, sports pulps would have to be pretty close to the bottom. Not that they weren’t popular in their day, they were, but if we are to judge popularity by the sheer number of different titles published, sports pulps (specifically all-sports pulps) rank below every other major type of pulp magazine. This makes sense, after all, because the sports pulps had to compete with the real thing, not only as played by real sportsmen but in the daily reportage of games in newspapers everywhere. But between 1923 and 1949 over fifty different all-sports pulp magazines were born, titles as inclusive as All-American Sports, New Sports Magazine, Sports Short Stories, or as specific as Big Baseball Stories, Basketball Stories or even Rodeo Romances (two different kinds of pulps in one, I suppose). By 1957 all but two of them, Super Sports and Ten-Story Sports,  had died, and those two gave up the ghost early that year.

John D MacDonald wrote for the sports pulps, a fact that surprised me when I first learned of it, and it still surprises people unfamiliar with his early writing career. Next to his mystery stories and his science fiction stories, nothing matches the quantity of sports short stories he wrote. And depending on how expansive the definition of sports one accepts, that number comes very close to his science fiction output. He wrote 29 stories that appeared in sports pulps, plus at least a dozen or more that were published in other kinds of magazines, both pulp of slick. The first JDM sports story to be published was “Coward in the Game,” and it was included in the November 25, 1946 issue of Short Stories. His first sports pulp appearance came in March 1947 with “That Old Gray Train,” but not before he had a second sports story appear in the January 4, 1947 issue of Liberty (“Hole in None”). That title is actually a fantasy tale, which allows it to appear in lists of both MacDonald’s sports stories as well as his science fiction tales. In fact, there are sports in all kinds of JDM writing, from mysteries (“The Deadly Game of Darts”) to sf (“Half-Past Eternity”) to even his novels. There’s tennis in Contrary Pleasure, Murder in the Wind and Bright Orange for the Shroud, and of course Travis McGee once played football.

MacDonald himself was an avid fisherman, and he counted boxing and golf among the sports he played and participated in at one time in his life. He wrote expertly about those fields, and also wrote well about auto racing, baseball, tennis, football, hockey, bowling, and even bull-fighting. JDM bibliographer Walter Shine once wrote, "... his sports writings ranged through so many fields as to suggest a multiplicity of writers, rather than a single one. The technical knowledge in each seems to be that of a seasoned student of the sport -- rather than an occasional onlooker ... Whatever he, or we, may now feel about the quality of the fiction, any of us would be hard put to fault the sports expertise he showed."

But who remembers this? I wrote back in 2009: “MacDonald's sports stories remain the least anthologized of all his fiction, with the possible exception of the mainstream work he produced later in his career for slicks like Good Housekeeping, Redbook and the Saturday Evening Post. Unlike the mystery and science fiction fields, there doesn't seem to be a subculture of fanatics and collectors clamoring for the re-publication of stories with titles like ‘Buzz-Saw Belter’ or ‘Fight, Scrub, Fight!’”

Or “Bye, Bye, Backfield.”

The story appeared in the July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories under one of MacDonald’s house names, John Wade Farrell, and it’s probably a story JDM was later glad was not identified as his. It’s not bad, just mediocre, a college football story about a new head coach coming in an upsetting a lot of apple carts. For the football fan it is full of technical details about plays, formations and tactics, but for the reader of fiction there’s little ground here that hasn’t been covered by hundreds of other writers in thousands of other stories.

The backfield in question is the offensive backfield of Mideastern, a mid-Atlantic college that could be a stand-in for any number of universities, but here probably one in New York or Pennsylvania. The team is down in Florida during an Easter Vacation break, training for the next season. This backfield for Mideastern consists of fullback Charlie Western, two halfbacks, Bus Milligan and Sancho Sanchinelli, and quarterback  Hal McKeever, who is also the first-person narrator. They are a unit that has been together since before college, on a service team, and were recruited together to play for Mideastern. And they have been very successful. The previous season they "smashed the Ivy League, broke the hearts of our two Big Ten guests and piled up a lopsided score in the bowl game." Every coach this backfield has had has made attempts to try out other players for those three positions, but no one has ever taken one. That’s because McKeever manages to make every tryout look bad by flubbing their timing. “Why should he break it up,” Bus asked. "We're a winning combo. This is our last season coming up. We're the inner circle..."

Enter a new coach.

[He was] a mountainous person named Bunny Hale, a recent fullback from the [pro] Burros. About twenty-nine years old, one of those boys who go to so small a school that they never make a clipping until a smart pro team grabs them and turns them loose on the publicized kids from the bigger outfits. With the Burros he had made a three-year average of 5.1 yards every time they handed him the ball. Maintaining such an average against outfits like the Packers is akin to consistently throwing rocks through a concrete wall.

After Hale is introduced at the first team meeting, he speaks to the troops about his initial impressions.

"I've been watching movies of you people. For a college team, you do good. Timing okay, fundamentals fair... The line has holes this season, but I think we can plug them. You have a lot of power in the backfield. You run too many off the T and not enough single and double wing. You could have added another three touchdowns to the season total last year by forgetting that T within the five-yard line and punching Western over from a single-wing, unbalanced line either way."

The following day the practices begin, and all morning Hale tries out new possible members of the backfield, and every one is mistimed by one of the group. But Hale persists, and it isn’t until late in the day when he puts the four together to show what they can do. Only now, Hale has suited up himself and will play defensive fullback. He manages to embarrass them on every play, to the point that they begin arguing and blaming each other. When the insults get bad enough, McKeever has to be held down as he tries to throw a punch at his fullback…

Of course the professional Bunny Hale knows what he is doing and things eventually work out once the insular backfield is shown the selfish error of their ways. There’s really little going on in “Bye, Bye, Backfield” that isn’t predictable or ho-hum. MacDonald’s prose is sharp and professional, and his descriptive powers used to create scene and character in a few, beautifully chosen words is on display, but the plot he uses is definitely thread-worn, even for 1949.

“Bye, Bye, Backfield” was one of four John D MacDonald stories to be published in this particular issue of Fifteen Sports Stories, the most to appear in a single issue of a magazine, pulp or otherwise. And one of those four stories was “Blue Water Fury,” one of the author’s very, very best short stories, so good he included it in his 1966 anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories under the new title “The Big Blue”. It was the only pulp story included there. So I suppose he can be forgiven for coming up a bit short with “Bye, Bye, Backfield”.

The story has never been reprinted.

"Blue Water Fury" ("The Big Blue")

In April 1981 John D MacDonald sat for an interview with fellow writer Dick Lupoff. Done for radio, it was a fascinating conversation that touched on many aspects of MacDonald’s early short story career, writing for the pulps and his relationships with several of the editors of those periodicals. Early on in the interview, Lupoff explains that he had done some research into MacDonald’s biography in “the standard reference works,” and MacDonald replied: “You may find a lot of contradiction, because I lie a lot.”

I remember that when I first read his response I was taken aback. Lie? What does John D MacDonald have to lie about? This is a guy who spends eight hours a day sitting in front of a typewriter. Married to the same woman for decades. The only lies I could imagine were ones used to spice up an otherwise dull biography. Years later when Hugh Merrill’s MacDonald biography The Red Hot Typewriter was published there appeared another admission of occasional mendacity, quoted in a letter JDM wrote to a friend about his upcoming bio written by Ed Hirshberg:

“Should you read Ed Hirshberg’s tome, you will find some obvious discrepancies here and there. That is because he is such a nice, gullible, trusting chap, I just can’t keep from lying to him. I know it is a bad habit, but I keep wondering how far I can go before he realizes it’s a put-on. This is a strange basis for a bio.”

It didn’t take long in the Lupoff interview for MacDonald to prove true to his word. Only a few questions later, when talking about “house names” -- that fairly static list of JDM pseudonyms employed by pulp magazine editors when more than one MacDonald story appeared in a single issue -- he let rip an assertion that was not questioned by Lupoff and has been taken as gospel by a few of his later chroniclers.

“I had one magazine -- I don’t know which -- I’ve still got it around somewhere -- where I wrote every story in it, so that I used about five of those [house] names in addition to my own.”

Well… I’m sure most readers or listeners bought that line when it was uttered, but not me. (I didn’t read a transcript of the interview until 1987 when it was included in the first edition of Mystery Scene Reader.) By then I was well steeped in the bibliography of John D MacDonald and knew about nearly all of his published work, thanks mainly to Walter and Jean Shine’s indispensable A Bibliography of the Published Works of John D. MacDonald. I knew, for example, multiple inclusions of JDM’s stories occurred only in pulp magazines, never in a mainstream or “slick” magazine. I knew that there were eighteen issues of various pulp magazines which contained two stories by MacDonald, and seven which included three. And I knew about the one time when a pulp contained four John D MacDonald short stories. It was undoubtedly this issue MacDonald was referring to in his conversation with Lupoff, and it has long been a sought after collector’s item among JDM fans. It wasn’t a mystery pulp, or even a science fiction pulp, but one of that rarest-of-all-and-hardest-to find collectables, a sports pulp. And if MacDonald had remembered the name of the magazine he would have given the game away.

The July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories does, indeed, contain fifteen stories, but only eleven were works of fiction. The remainder were cheats: running columns, quizzes and other “departments and features.” The four MacDonald pieces and their listed authors were:

“The Glory Punch” by John D. MacDonald (Boxing)

“Bye, Bye Backfield” by John Wade Farrell (Football)

“The Thunder Road” by Peter Reed (Auto Racing)

“Blue Water Fury” by Scott O’Hara (Deep Sea Sport Fishing)

This would only be a bibliographer’s attempt to count a gang of angels dancing on the head of a pin if it was not for the fact that one of these stories was of enduring quality and was one of the author’s proudest short story achievements. “Blue Water Fury,” a title the magazine’s editor came up with after discarding the author’s “Freedom by Violence,” is a 5,000 word story ostensibly about a particular day of fishing but really concerns itself with the weightier themes of domination, determination and freedom.

Told in the first person by a somewhat passive observer, “Blue Water Fury” takes place in Acapulco and the nearby Gulf of Mexico off of the Yucatan peninsula. Referred to only by his last name, Thompson is an American who has been living in Mexico for some time, and he is an expert deep sea fisherman. Planning an outing for the next day he approaches one of his favorite charter boat captains, Pedro Martinez, skipper of the Orizaba, only to be joined by a rival pair who arrive at the same time. Agreeing that the three of them can charter the boat together, they make the arrangements and head across the street to share a beer together. Thompson immediately begins to regret his decision.

The pair are an odd couple, and in another day and in the hands of a different author these two men might have had some homosexual undertones going, but not here, at least not in any overt sense. Lew Wolta, the alpha male, is initially described by MacDonald in terms that are both familiar and predictive for readers who know his work.

“Wolta was a tall, hard, heavy-shouldered man in his late thirties with a huge voice, white teeth gleaming in a constant grin, and washed-out eyes that never smiled at all. He kept up a running chatter, most of which seemed designed to inflict hurt on the younger, frailer Jimmy Gerran, a quiet lad with a humble manner… Over the beer, Wolta said, ‘Yeah, I ran into Jimmy up in Taxco and it was pretty obvious that he needed somebody to get him out of his daze. Hell, I’ve never been in this gook country before, but I’ve got a nose for fun. Leave Jimmy alone and he’d spend all his time walking around the streets.” At that he had slapped Gerran roughly on the shoulder. ‘Tomorrow we hook a sail, boy, and it’ll make a man out of you.’”

When Thompson arrives at the dock the next morning he finds Wolta and Gerran already there, and it is obvious from Pedro’s manner that Wolta has been treating him rudely. In Spanish Pedro tells Thompson that Wolta has been speaking to him “as if I were his gardener.” Wolta is instantly suspicious of the conversation he cannot understand and asks what was said. Thompson replies, “He said that he thinks we’ll have a good day.” Once at sea the experienced Thompson sets the fishing ground rules: two men have lines out seated in the two fishing chairs. Once one man hooks a fish the other must quickly reel in his line. Once the man who hooked the prey either catches or loses his fish, he is replaced by the third fisherman.

Throughout the day Wolta is disdainful of Thompson’s expertise and rulemaking, reacting sarcastically to nearly every utterance out of the narrator’s mouth. And even though neither Woltz or Gerran have ever been deep sea fishing before, Wolta acts like a know-it-all and continually refers to Thompson as “the expert.” Jimmy Gerran seems genuinely interested in the mechanics at hand and asks Thompson to explain everything in detail. After a lengthy explanation of how to use the rod and what to do when there’s a strike, Jimmy asks Thompson how he will know if the fish has been hooked. Woltz roars with laughter and replies, “ He’ll rise up and talk to you, boy. He’ll come up and tell you all about it.”

Wolta and Jimmy are the first two in the chairs, and Jimmy is the first to hit a strike. After a bit of a struggle the catch breaks the line and escapes, resulting in the following exchange:

“Absolutely beautiful!” Jimmy said softly.

Wolta gave a hoarse laugh. “Absolutely butterfingered, pal. You had him and you lost him.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jimmy said.

“I’d have liked to see him boated,” Wolta said. “What the hell good is it to look at a fish?”

Next to land a strike is Thompson, another sailfish slightly smaller than the one Jimmy lost. With little effort Thompson reels it to boatside, where the crew of three (Pedro and two crewmembers) club the fish and bring it aboard. Jimmy looks at it wide-eyed and says “That was wonderful.” Wolta responds, “The experts are always wonderful… Do I have your permission to fish?”

When Wolta makes his own strike, the landing of it is “a comedy of errors,” but eventually, with some unsolicited help from Thompson, he reels in a ninety pound sailfish. After Pedro and crew club and bring the fish onboard, Wolta does a curious thing: he grabs a club from one of the sailors and hits it again.

“It was an understandable thing to do. But the way he did it, the way the club smashed against the hard flesh, revealed something savage and soul-naked about the man… He kicked the dead fish. I didn’t like that and neither did Pedro. A sail is an honorable opponent, a brave fish, a gentleman of the sea. Even dead he isn’t to be kicked.”

It’s Jimmy’s turn again and as he seats himself Wolta calls out from inside where he is getting a beer, “Both the men have got a fish, kid. Now let’s see if you can lose another one.” Jimmy smiles weakly. After a long time without results, Wolta gets impatient and wants to fish again. He begins browbeating Jimmy into setting a time limit, and after repeated haranguing Jimmy agrees.

“The older man had him buffaloed. I knew the signs. I liked Gerran. So all I could do was to think that it was just too bad… While I was wondering how Gerran got himself tied up with Wolta, Pedro hissed and said, in Spanish, ‘There is a monstrous fish to starboard, señor.’”

It’s a monster, indeed, not a ninety pound sailfish, but “five hundred pounds of blue marlin.” Jimmy hooks it with four perfectly timed strikes, and then the battle begins. It’s a long, exhausting affair that tries the limits of the seemingly placid Jimmy Gerran, with an impatient Wolta interjecting cutting remarks while at the same time imploring his companion to give up and let Wolta take over the battle. When it is all over one of these three men is a different person.

Told directly and with not a wasted word or sentence, MacDonald wrote this tale of honor and independence with the style and economy that would become his trademark for the rest of his career. Wolta, especially, is a “type” that MacDonald developed and used repeatedly throughout his career. Perhaps it is because I am currently rereading it for an upcoming posting, but he reminds me especially of Warren Dodge, a character in his 1957 novel A Man of Affairs. There are plenty of others, most notably John Lash in the similarly told story “The Killer.”

MacDonald loved this story and never forgot it. He freely admitted that most of his early work had been lost to memory, and that when he studied most of the possible inclusions for his latter-day pulp anthologies The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff, he had no idea how most of the stories would end. But in 1966 he remembered “Blue Water Fury” well enough to include it in his first short story anthology, End of the Tiger and Other Stories. Mainly a collection of the best of his mainstream slick magazine short stories, it is the only pulp story included in that book.

And although finding any critical mention or discussion of any of MacDonald’s 400 published short stories is almost as impossible as finding an old copy of the July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories, “The Big Blue,” as it was retitled by MacDonald for End of the Tiger and Other Stories, was actually one of the only short works ever discussed outside of the late, lamented and sorely missed JDM Bibliophile. Ed Hirshberg, in his 1985 biography of the author gives the story a few sentences while discussing the author’s growth as a writer. Unfortunately he fumbles the ball embarrassingly, making comparisons to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and decrying a “rather inappropriate ending.” I won’t reveal more, only to say that if you decide to read “The Big Blue,” go read Hirshberg’s paragraph on the piece, if only to see how facile and supercilious it is. And if you’ve ever read The Old Man and the Sea you might actually laugh out loud. As for that “inappropriate ending,” I’ll admit that it’s a bit abrupt in the flow of the narrative, but after a second reading it seems like the perfect coda.

“The Big Blue” even got a mention in that Dick Lupoff interview I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, a rare accomplishment for any of John D MacDonald’s short stories.

Lupoff: Would you care to mention your [favorite short stories]?

MacDonald: Well, I like “The Annex” and I like “The Bear Trap” …

Lupoff: “The Big Blue” -- the fishing story?

MacDonald: I like that one, yes. That was sort of based… You know how little things happen. Budd Schulberg was telling me about going fishing with his father in Acapulco and having another person aboard ship that so enjoyed clubbing the fish that he wouldn’t let the guide do it. He wanted to do it himself. It’s a kind of the germ of it.”

And that’s how (some) great fiction is born.

The story, now forever known as “The Big Blue,” is available in ebook form through Amazon and (probably) other online outlets as one of the stories in End of the Tiger and Other Stories. And used copies of the original paperback are always floating around.